Tag Archives: Citizens

I recently have moved to a new apartment in the city of New York, right next to Central Park, in 104th St. I didn’t even realize when I was within the insanity involved in apartment hunting in Manhattan (something worth an entire investigation, not only for the prizes, but for the typologies), but right across the street there is a Community Garden.

Recently published, the book “The Spontaneous City” (Urhahn Urban Design, BIS Publishers) is a strong statement about the future of Urbanism. Though I am still going trough its pages, I think the interesting manifesto that opens the publication deserves a post, since in it I have found many ideas related to an open source urban design.

In the manifesto, the authors propose a change in the traditional urban planning, a new starting point by taking the city as a “marketplace” in which supply and demand from users sculpts urban form.

Is it possible to think about living in a home when you are young, another during your adulthood, and another when you grow old? I’m not talking about owning them, not even renting just one specific space; I am talking about a wider and more open housing system that enriches both the individuals and the city.

Our society is more diverse than ever, mobility is a concept increasingly present in our lives; it changes, evolves and creates very different profiles of citizens. Is Architecture, Urbanism or Real Estate Market responding to this situation?

Is it sustainable to buy a home when you are thirty years old, pay for it thirty more, and never move from it?

What does it mean for a person to grow older seeing how your needs are changing but the architectural space around stays still?

Lately, citizens’ movements demanding a change in the system have been happening in different places and different times. The Arab spring, the Indignados movement in Spain, protests in Greece, Occupy Wall Street, they all share characteristics that put them in direct relationship to the public space of the city. They have led to the reunion between citizens and the space that most defines the city in a purely urban fact.

Tahir Square in Egypt, Sol in Spain, Syntagma in Greece, have become the formal container of the citizens’ claim of an area that belongs to them, in which they become capable of expressing a common strength that would not be the same intense without this space.